Web Development

More Cowbell, Via Audio Fingerprinting For Music Apps

By Adrian Bridgwater, February 20, 2013

Gracenote APIs and SDKs hope to strike a chord for music innovation among developers

Gracenote has launched its developer program in a bid to offer its music APIs and SDKs to developers. The firm claims to offer the largest database of music metadata on the planet along with a music recognition technology software service.

NOTE: The firm's reference guide explains that the Music Web API is a web service optimized for lightweight client applications to "retrieve and explore" music-related information. Using this service, applications can deliver a digital entertainment experience by giving users tools to manage and enjoy music collections on media devices, including desktop and mobile devices.

The Music Web API is described as "the most comprehensive identification solution in the industry" with the ability to recognize, categorize, and organize any music source, including CDs, digital files, or audio streams.

Developers can now access Gracenote's Mobile Client featuring Gracenote MusicID, an "audio fingerprinting" technology that can be integrated into mobile apps to identify artists, albums, and tracks by simply holding a phone to the music — in a café (or wherever). The firm notes that Gracenote MusicID has powered popular music recognition apps and services from Soundtracking and Sony TrackID to musiXmatch and Rhapsody SongMatch.

"Innovation comes from anywhere, not just from big, well-funded companies," said Stephen White, president of Gracenote. "There is no other open development platform for music available today that has the depth and scale that Gracenote supports. We want to discover the next great music developers by giving them a chance to dive deep into this data and technology, play around with it, and see what they can create."

The Gracenote Developer program supports a variety of development platforms, including mobile, desktop, and web APIs. These APIs enable the recognition of music from text lookups, CDs, digital files, and audio captured with a mobile device, and returns descriptive metadata for more than 2,000 music genres and subgenres, artist origins, and more than 100 music moods. Developers can also tap into the world's largest source of album cover art, artist biographies, and other related content.

"During the early days of CDDB, developers had access to our database and service for free, and their participation was key to our success,” said Steve Scherf, cofounder of Gracenote. "We created the Gracenote Developer program to not only acknowledge our roots, but also because we believe that allowing developers to access our services will benefit Gracenote and the music community as a whole."

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